Since MMORPGs and virtual worlds arrived, there have always been people willing to spend money for virtual goods. Most of the time this is against the terms of the world, with a few notable exceptions. There are a growing number of games that have embraced microtransactions, including Guild Wars and Farmville. In fact the Free2Play MMORPG market is based on this.

Facebook closed their gift shop a while ago. It was making money, and it certainly proved that Facebook users were prepared to buy pixels long before Zynga was around. The closure of the gift shop was not a step backwards. Facebook is doing more now than ever to make it easy for people to get Facebook Credits to spend, they can even be bought as a gift card in real life.

People are willing to spend real money on virtual goods, and Facebook will profit from expanding the market for Facebook Credits. As a platform accessible through multiple devices Facebook is well placed to facilitate a virtual economy based on games, virtual and real goods purchased online with their currency.

All communication is a marketing communication, including customer service. This is even more critical in public spaces like the Internet. However there are still a number of important points to be considered when determining if a response is needed, and what form it should take.

• What is the nature of the complaint?
• Where is the negative commentary taking place?
• What is the company’s relationship with the affected parties?
• Who is exposed and potentially will be exposed to the negative commentary?
• What action, if any, has already been taken on the issue?

What is the nature of the complaint?

Reasonable, articulate or funny negative commentary can have the greatest impact through credibility and potential to spread. Inarticulate, abusive and unreasonable complaints usually do not gain much traction, and will attract more attention if they are given attention.

Where is the negative commentary taking place?

A brand’s presence on the Internet is not limited to a single site any more. Most brands have a fragmented presence spread across a number of platforms, sites and mediums, either perceived as being under their control, or operated by a third party.

Dealing with complaints in managed spaces, such as a Facebook page, will more often require direct action than a comment on a small community forum. Legitimate complaints can be an opportunity to explain or demonstrate a product, answer a frequently asked question or express a brand value to the touchpoint’s audience. Any response given does create a reasonable expectation that should another issue be raised in that space, the company will need to address it too.

What is the company’s relationship with the affected parties?

The more involved the customer is with the company or brand, the less likely they are to be a troll and the more the relationship is worth to the company. However, new customers with legitimate complaints should not be ignored.

Who is exposed and potentially will be exposed to the negative commentary?

Does the negative attention have a large or small audience? Is it indifferent, supportive of the brand or hostile? Someone saying bad things about a brand to other people who already agree and are not your customers should probably not be your first priority. Trolls trying to start a flame war with brand advocates are another situation that probably does not need direct engagement.

What action, if any, has already been taken on the issue?

Customer complaints, legitimate or otherwise, often have a history. Social media is not always the first point of contact between the brand and the customer. Often there is a history to any complaint. Ideally the complaint would have been resolved before it entered a public space, but sometimes these things happen.

Very rarely will a brand benefit from engaging with a troll. The attention will often make the problem that much worse, and give them more credibility and consequently attention. While potentially almost any form of content can reach a huge audience online, not every tweet, post, video or blog will. Dealing with legitimate problems in a public space can be an excellent opportunity to to explain or demonstrate a product, answer a frequently asked question or express a brand value to an audience. Responding to trolls does not support any of these objectives. Choosing who to respond to, where and how is an important part of a Social Media Engagement strategy, and should be treated as such.

Slash the web

What makes Blekko unique in an industry dominated by a giant and littered with the corpses of both startups and mature brands is user driven search segmentation, through something called slashtags.

Slashtags limit a search to a preselected group of sites or APIs, determine how the results are sorted, the information displayed ( /rank is the prime example ) and much more. Slashtags can be private or public, and are transparent in what they do to the search results. There are a number of broad catagories that slashtags fall into: User, Built-in and Topic. Built-in slashtags include tools such as /date (listing by date), /noporn (remove porn), and /weather (five day weather forecasts for a location) and a number of other tools, filters and third party APIs like /twitter.

User generated slashtags can be made to search within a specific group of sites and other slashtags. User created slashtags can be ether private or public. Public slashtags can be seen and used by other users.

Why things rank

If you want to know what influences the rankings of a particular query, Blekko will tell you. There is a built-in slashtag, /rank, which lists ranking criteria and weighting available in their search. Known in and outbound links are also available on any domain within the search engine.

When you consider their founding principles, this is not too extraordinary.

1. Search shall be open
2. Search results shall involve people
3. Ranking data shall not be kept secret
4. Web data shall be readily available
5. There is no one-size-fits-all for search
6. Advanced search shall be accessible
7. Search engine tools shall be open to all
8. Search & community go hand-in-hand
9. Spam does not belong in search results
10. Privacy of searchers shall not be violated

I suspect that the Blekko SEO and link tools will become as popular as Yahoo! Site Explorer used to be for SEO analysis. The fact that Blekko is no more likely to replicate how Google crawls the web and what content and links it finds than Yahoo! was won’t dull their enthusiasm.

Why Blekko?

Blekko is far more transparent in what influences which sites appear in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Google is providing a more personalised search experience, and most users are not in a position to judge why something ranks and how much their own behaviour has influenced its position.

Slashtags will probably be the killer app for Blekko. Creating specific sharable groupings of sites for searching has a lot of applications for managing information and removing content farms from a SERP when they are not wanted. Adding an element of human curation to search is very cool and deserves at least one more follow up post.

Social Media Sandwich

Why not go further? Why not move from a boring world of plates, knives and forks, to a place where salami and salad can be enjoyed at the same time between two pieces of bread? The sandwich is a truly revolutionary construct. Taking the best of both foods and making them available in the one easy to consume package through the medium of baked goods.

How do you eat it? Must you use a plate, can you carry it with you, maybe it is only available in a specific restaurant and you can’t take it away? Or is it the übermensch of sandwiches and able to be eaten in whatever way you see fit, and if so, is this the revolutionary development? There are a lot of content aggregation tools available now, from Friendfeed through to Google Buzz, Windows Live Messenger Beta and device specifc tools like MOTOBLUR, Flipboard and Google’s Social Search. They vary greatly in capabilities, sources of media they can access and curation tools, but they perform the same task for the user.

A lot of these services and tools take a few social media activity streams and create a single feed, but a few index or include the content linked to and present it to the user directly. Flipboard delivers this content in the app, and Google Social Search presents the links in a results page of a relevant search query.

Questions of fair use and legality aside, providing socially sourced content from multiple sources in the one place with tools to make this information manageable is a significant development in how the Internet is used. From Google’s personalisation of search to the increasing importance of social networks for filtering content and the shift away from static portals, each user’s experience of the Internet is becoming more unique.

Why the Site

Devoting all content creation and administration resources to single site or community is no longer the best strategy. Internet users seek out different content in different formats for different platforms. What meets their needs on their mobile phones will be different to what they want on their desktop computer, or their netbook, web-enabled TV, or tablet device. After all, social media is just people being people online, and what they use and how is a result of this.

The kind of platform and task they want to complete changes how they search for, evaluate and use content. From asking their social network for advice, to searching for product demonstrations on YouTube or store locations on Google Maps.

There is a need for the ‘Big Website’ and campaign or product specific microsites. While there is a need for control over a hub to facilitate list building, acquire links and generate direct navigation traffic, sites and microsites will be a part of the mix. While Facebook is not likely to suffer the same fate as Blogetery, developing content on external platforms also comes with a certain level of risk.

Being visible across multiple, relevant platforms, sites and communities gives brands the chance to manage the user’s experience of the brand. Providing compelling content and engaging with customers, the brand can develop on its campaigns further, ensure that customer service queries can be responded to and clarify information about their products.

Creating brand touchpoints like fan pages is an “as well as”, not an “instead of” developing microsites and promoting the the brand’s main web presence. They are an opportunity to put content in front of the customer in the place that they already are, and in a format tailored for the situation. A YouTube channel, Second Life store and a Facebook page are not a substitute for the spaces online that the brand controls.

Like the Internet, Google’s App Inventor will follow Sturgeon’s Revelation. Just like Blogger, the Little Big Planet level editor and the Spore creature creation tools, there will be some awesome stuff built with totally original ideas and a huge volume of dross to shovel through to find them.

Tools that simplify creation and distribution of content lower or eradicate barriers of entry. The ability to create at a level equal to that of the new tools is commoditised. The real value at this level of content becomes the idea, its execution, and being able to find what you want. After all, there is a lot of content and some is good enough for most of the market and free. It is only the remarkable that people will pay for.

If the ability to find the relevant stuff had no value, search engines wouldn’t exist. All media distribution channels or nodes have used this editorial power to create value, online and offline.

The ability to find the relevant stuff is valuable, and Google has built their business on this idea. The Android App Marketplace has been criticised for its high number of poor and legally dodgy applications, from potentially malicious apps to those using unlicensed intellectual property. The Android Killswitch was announced, but there is bound to be more to come from Google on providing a better way to sort, classify and deliver relevant apps, because if they don’t, someone else will.

Winning at PVP in EVE Online

Wining at Spreadsheets in Space

PVP in EVE Online is not fair. In fact the challenge in PVP in EVE Online is in setting up these unfair encounters. In most MMORPGs, the actual act of combat consists of a few mouse clicks and some waiting. EVE Online is no different. It is the risk of losing stuff that makes players focus on everything before the actual combat a lot more. It is taking the right mix of ships, avoiding being out-numbered and cornered by a superior foe and acting before the opponent even knows they are in a fight where player skill starts to make a real difference.

Why SEM is like EVE Online PVP

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in very similar to PVP. It is a zero-sum environment where operators compete for a resource through actions governed by a set of rules and environmental factors generated through user behaviour. There are a few principles that carry over from EVE Online PVP to SEM.

• Situational awareness is king
  • Know how the advertising network works
  • Understand competitive activity
  • Understand how the market behaves
• Observe, act and assess
  • Analysis without an accompanying action is useless
  • Assess the effectiveness of activity & reassess decision making model
  • And repeat…
• Know where you can compete and where you can’t
  • Don’t waste time & resources competing directly with advertisers intent on outspending you
  • Find alternative ways of reaching potential customers.

Information is the key. Understanding how the query space works, having good situational awareness, and knowing where in the sales funnel certain terms are is valuable. It won’t save you from the SEM equivalent of a gate camp (high margin and ‘branding’ campaigns with large budgets), but it is essential for remaining competitive without burning through your budget.

Google has just announced that Ad Sitelinks are now available for any campaign and the introduction of seller rating extensions. Getting Ad Sitelinks to display is still dependent on the ad meeting certain criteria, most probably relating to the spot on the page the ad displays in as determined by bid, competition and click through.

Ad Sitelinks provide alternative points of entry to the site aside from the main landing page, allowing the advertiser to offer alternative offers. Links to areas such as “Store Location”, “Quote Calculator” or “Product Reviews” can appeal to viewers who might not have responded to the main offer.

Search can be a powerful indication of intent, but with more generic terms, the action or information sought by the market can vary between individuals. With branded or descriptive terms the visitor might be seeking further information beyond the noun and a price point. Ad Sitelinks makes it possible to provide this at first glance, and generate traffic where the user may otherwise have continued on to the organic listings.

Using the same visual language of the organic results also makes the ad appear more authoritative and trustworthy. The addition of seller ratings can create the same effect. Creating richer content in a format closer to what the user is trained to look for on a SERP gives the advertiser the opportunity to disrupt their normal search and engage with the ad.

Bing has announced some new features in search this week. Explained in the Bing Gets a Fresh Look post, content themed on Auto, Finance and Entertainment information was used to demonstrate “great new decision-making tools in [these] areas”. Similar to the enhanced Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) served by Google and Bing, these new tools take search closer to portals in their content consumption model.

In many ways SERPs are becoming more like portal content pages. Search goes beyond an ordered directory of URLs and descriptions. Content including maps, scanned books, images, video, news, blogs, product listings, and social media material is indexed and increasingly being presented in the main SERP as a part of an enhanced search result.

Indexing Entertainment Media

The Internet is an important source of entertainment, either supporting content available through other channels or material native to the web. As said by Bing’s Yusuf Mehdi in his “A New Entertainment Experience For Bing” post:

“In the field of entertainment, 76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go.”

Entertainment information, from song lyrics to game trailers to film reviews, matters to the user, and can take many different forms. The challenge is in organising it in a human friendly way, similar to what has already started to happen with geographic information and maps. The search engine can programmatically add more content in locations under their control in a theoretically infinitely scalable fashion.

Search in the Music Business

Google is also in the entertainment business. Beyond their search properties and YouTube, Google’s acquisition of Simplifymedia during May hints strongly at Google directly entering the music business. It is likely that Google would add their product to the search experience in the same way as Google Commerce feeds (formerly Google Base) are added to the index or through applications in Chrome or Android.

Lady Gaga on Bing

Lady Gaga on Yahoo! Music

Search is starting to provide a portal-like experience. As the search experience becomes richer, more personalised and more aware of the location of the user, it gets closer to providing the experience sites like Yahoo! do, but with finer levels of customisation through queries. Pages like Yahoo! Music may soon be eclipsed by pages like Bing Entertainment or the current Bing Lady Gaga SERP. In the end it will be how the consumer prefers to consume and seek out content that will determine this. It is passive consumption versus searching with intent.

Social media is just people being people online, but with better tools. Nothing has changed in their behaviour; it is their ability to be found and heard, and find others who think the same that is new and significant. Social media and the internet amplify the voices of those who publish content online, whether they love you or hate you.

Sometimes people will say things that businesses would prefer them not to. The internet has made it easier than ever to publish and spread this material. Sites like Facebook and WordPress make it easy to tap into an existing audience, or get indexed by Google and appear in brand searches. When a product or service has a branded social media presence or community, it can give them access to a highly relevant audience for their dissatisfaction, ire and angst, which can disrupt the business’ promotional activity and damage the brand.

It is hard to completely avoid this risk without losing the benefits from fostering conversation and building online communities. Here are a few ways a business can prepare to address these problems if or when they arise:

• Anticipate the negative responses and plan on how and how not to respond
• Make internal stakeholders aware of what can go wrong
• Communicate response plans and processes internally with key stakeholders
• Ensure that those with the authority to respond in negative situations are easily reached
• Make staff aware of relevant policies

If no thought is given to what might go wrong, there is a greater risk of the company responding badly, and inflaming the situation further. Planning for problems that may arise before the fact ensures that the business’ response will most likely be timely, articulate and appropriate.